Word: rubbers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Damn it, men, things are in a hell of a fix and a tough job's got to be done, he said in substance after Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Nelson named him tsar to produce and conserve rubber. The actual words are the ones the hardboiled, red-faced, Irish Bill Jeffers spoke one day in January 1922 to trainmen clustered around a red-hot, pot-bellied stove in the Hanna, Wyo. depot...
Boss of this crowd is tall, swarthy Sherman Harrison Dalrymple who has been in the middle of Akron's rubber mess ever since 1919, is now the president of the powerful U.R.W. Once a rubber worker himself, Boss Dalrymple knows it is tough, hot, backbreaking work. So he wants his members to work less and earn more...
...Stuff. In effect a city wide slowdown system, this form of economic suicide went on without causing trouble until Pearl Harbor. Then things changed. Akron rubber manufacturers, deluged with $1 billion in orders, were suddenly faced with their biggest job ever (TIME, Feb. 2). So they started hiring thousands of men. In no time at all Akron's unemployment fell to 6,000 men, of whom fewer than 1,000 had any rubber manufacturing experience at all. To ease the pinch, manufacturers put women to work on barrage balloons, life rafts, similar items; Goodyear and Firestone established training schools...
This was not enough. The companies went to Dalrymple, finally persuaded him to put some workers on an eight-hour day. But last week over 75% of Akron's rubber workers were still on a six-hour day. Even the union admits that per man output has not increased since Pearl Harbor...
...Bill Jeffers tackled the chaotic Rubber Scandal this week in the hellbent, direct-action way he has run the Union Pacific Railroad...